How I Learned That College Students Aren’t Snowflakes
- sciart0
- Aug 16
- 1 min read
Excerpt: "For years I threatened to teach a course called “Books You’ll Never Read in College.” It wasn’t only that I had grown tired of hearing students parrot the ideological orthodoxy on campus. My main concern, as a teacher of applied ethics, was that many of my students were reluctant to talk about important social, moral and political issues.
When I asked my students to share anonymously what topics they would do their best to avoid in the classroom, the list included pretty much anything controversial: guns, religion, pronouns, the Middle East, abortion, LGBTQ rights, socialism, sexism in the workplace, transgender athletes in sports, parallels between transgenderism and transracialism, race, policing, support for or opposition to President Trump and “anything that might anger others.”
This spring, I made good on my threat. I came up with a better name for the course: “You Can’t Think That! Or Can You?” I wrote a provocative course description to attract students. The syllabus would begin with Plato’s “Apology” and John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” and then would move to contemporary works such as Thomas Sowell’s “Social Justice Fallacies,” Heather Mac Donald’s “The War on Cops,” Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage,” and Brad Wilcox’s “Get Married.”
To my surprise, the course filled within minutes and amassed a substantial wait list.